In an era where cybersecurity threats loom larger than ever, protecting your dealership is not just about safeguarding data—it's about securing your future. "Securing Your Dealership’s Future: The Comply.Law Cybersecurity & Compliance Guide" is your comprehensive webinar that delves deep into the cybersecurity and compliance challenges faced by the automotive retail industry today.

Join Bart Wilson and industry experts as they uncover the latest cybersecurity strategies, compliance protocols, and best practices designed to shield your dealership from cyber threats and regulatory fines. From understanding the landscape of cybersecurity in automotive retail to implementing a culture of compliance within your team, this guide is tailored to navigate the complexities of today's digital threats.



We sat down. with Greg Gifford from SearchLab Digital and discussed the current state of search. We talk about AI's Revolutionary Role in SEO: and xplore how AI innovations, particularly Google's SGE, are reshaping SEO approaches for automotive websites. We also discuss mastering SEO adaptations and Greg shares strategic insights for dealerships aiming to excel in SEO amidst the AI evolution. Our conversation turned to the need for dealers to elevate their content quality and answering customer questions.

How is Google’s generative AI progressing?

So the big thing with Google AI. There was a public beta test for SGE, which stands for Search Generative Experience, and this was out in the fall and everybody freaked out because there's all kinds of companies out there saying this is going to remove 60% of traffic and people are already out there at SEO conferences talking about how you optimize for SGE, which is complete fearmongering and B.S.

If you studied SGI pretty in-depth while it was out, it changed every day. It was literally a public experiment for Google. Google released SGE because Bing released the ChatGPT powered being search results and Google didn't want to lose market share, so it tried the same thing. What you have to realize though, Google is going to be very cautious and kind of avoid doing SGI as long as it can because anything Google does to screw with the search results screws with Google's revenue. If Google starts serving up SGE, there's not really a lot of space for ads and ad revenue drops precipitously very quickly. So personally, I don't have the tinfoil hat on that everyone else has about AI and search. I think it's still a bit further away. 

The thing that will matter for dealers, though, is finally, hopefully people will be forced to create better content on their website because for so long we've had horrible content on dealership websites from SEO vendors who are churning out horrible content just for the sake of churning out content. I think this could potentially force people to finally have content that's helpful to customers instead of content that targets Google.

Automotive may not be affected as much by generative AI.

The other thing is how do we really know it's 50 or 60%? Those are the big numbers that get thrown around. But how do people really know that? Because there's no way to test this in the real world and know that this is the amount of traffic that goes away. 

Plus, I think we're a little bit isolated in automotive. People tend to do a lot more research before buying a car than before buying other things because cars are one of the most expensive purchases you're going to make in your life. You do a lot of research. You look at a lot of photos, you're looking at reviews, you're looking at the dealership site. 

The sites that are more likely to be hit by any sort of a release with AI type search results are the sites that are just providing a quick answer to a question where, sure, everyone's going to say, I want somebody to come to my website to get that answer. But as a customer, as a user of a search engine, do you really need to go to a website to get an answer like what does the MPG of the Ridgeline truck? No, you don't need to go to Google for that. Or what's the towing capacity of the 2024 F-150? You don't need to go to a website for that.

That means all those really crappy blog posts go away from all those crappy SEO providers that are writing blog posts on what the towing capacity of the 2024 F-150 is, and they write 300 words of B.S. when all you need to know is the couple a word answer of what that is. Websites that exist to give simple answers like that, I think those are going to go the way of the dinosaur.

I think dealership websites are still here for a long time, at least in the foreseeable future, because people need to go somewhere to get that research, and you can't go to Google and ask, (I'm in Dallas and I always use Ford as an example) you can't be in Dallas and say, I want to buy an F-150 and it tells you where to go because there's 20 dealerships in town that are all within driving distance. There's still a need there in a lot of cases to go to a website and get a more in-depth answer than a single few word answer. So I feel like we'll be a little bit isolated from that. But I mean, nobody really knows what's going to happen with this AI stuff, so who knows?

How important is solid content in SEO today?

If AI is writing content based off of crappy content that's been written in the past, it's going to be crappy content. Obviously AI is going to get really smart really fast and we could go down a whole rabbit hole talking about future predictions there.

But for now, AI can't just write content that's passable for most websites. You're going to have to have some sort of human editing in there to fix it before it's ready for public consumption. But at some point that's coming and AI is going to be able to write passable content for a lot of stuff. 

But it's not going to be able to come up with the content strategy. It's not going to be able to figure out the right things. Eventually, sure. I mean, we're probably 20 to 50 years away from nobody needs to work anymore because AI and robots are going to do everything for us, but we're not talking about 20 years away. We're not going to right now. And right now, especially with the core update. The March core update that Google is rolling out right now revolves around the quality of content and how that content answers questions. It's definitely a play by Google to combat some of the really crappy AI content. A lot of crappy content has been thrown up over the last six months to a year. But Google's really trying to move in a direction to reward that content that really answers the questions your potential customers have. I think that's where a lot of dealers miss out because they're not reading the content that's on their site. They're hiring an SEO vendor to just create content, or they're writing their own crappy content based on what they see on the competition sites, and they're not thinking about writing content that's answering the questions that their customers are going to have and providing helpful experiences to their potential customers. You know, look at all the pop ups that everybody has. 

Everybody's like, let's put on all these pop ups. I was talking to a dealership last week that when you hit the home page of the website, you had to click four times to get rid of all the chat pop ups and other pop ups on the screen before you could even read anything. And I'm like, Guys, are you even thinking about this? What would you do if you were a customer and you land on the website? They're like, we closed them all. We wouldn't even read them. And I'm like, Yeah, so why do you have them there? And they're like, Well, you know, our owner thinks that it's going to convert. I'm like, Ask your owner what he would do if he came to this website. He wouldn't click them either. So it's hopefully going to cause a shift in the way that dealers think about their websites and they stop thinking of it as just a place to have cars listed and they start thinking of it as this is a place to answer potential customers questions so that those customers decide to call.

How would you define quality content?

If you are doing a Google search and you wanted to know the towing capacity of the 2024 F-150, do you need to go to a website to get that and read hundreds of words of crap? Or do you just need to know the towing capacity is 3500 lbs or whatever it is, right? You just need to know what the towing capacity is. If that's the specific question you entered to Google, you don't need to go to a website. If you were like wondering what day St Patrick's Day was and you're like, What day is St Patrick's Day? You don't need to go to a website to see that. Google can give you that information.

So dealers need to think to the more complex questions that customers have, like, you know, maybe on a on a Bronco. Okay, what does 3500 lbs towing capacity actually mean? You could tow these things. What are the other questions people are going to ask? What's the difference between the Ford and the Chevy truck? What are the benefits between one or the other?

Why should you buy from this Ford dealership and not the other Ford dealership that's 5 minutes up the street? What can you do with this truck? How are we going to take care of you after you bought it? In SEO terms, it's short tail versus long tail. The short answer, one little one or two word queries, that's not where you need to be thinking. You need to be thinking to the longer tail stuff of the buyer journey, because if someone's asking what the towing capacity is of a truck, that doesn't mean they're necessarily ready to buy or going to buy right now. That's early funnel or even mid funnel questions. Most dealers are only writing extreme bottom of funnel questions, so dealers are going to need to start thinking about what's that whole journey between "I think I want to buy a new car and this is the car I want to buy." There's a lot that happens between those two points and that's what they need to be writing content about.

Quality content answers customer questions.

I saw a post on a dealership site the other day. We were talking to a group that had a lot of Ford dealers in it, and they had a post on one page that was "How powerful is the new 2024 Ford Lightning Truck?" That was the title of the blog post. And then it was a picture of the truck and it was like, Hey, we've got new Lightning Store stock, Lightning's in stock. Click this link to check them out. What's the point? It wasn't even 100 words. The title of the blog post is How Powerful Is the New Lightning?, which means people want to go and read about what's the charging capacity like? How far can you get on a single charge highway versus city versus towing? How long does it take to charge? What kind of towing capacity do you have? What are the cool internal features? That's something that answers how powerful this truck is. Putting up "How powerful is this truck?" And then just having a link to your inventory that doesn't answer the question that you are trying to answer. 

Dealers have to stop thinking about. I need to create content that gets me a lead right now because that's not the direction things are going. The content that gets you a lead right now, that's your VDP. You don't have other content that gets you leads right now other than fixed ops content, obviously. But for sales related content, what's going to sell you the car is the VDP. You don't need to create all this other crap you've been creating. Instead, create that early to mid funnel stuff that's talking about why you should buy this car, what the different features are of this car, how this car compares to other things, why moms like SUVs better than minivans or whatever that would be and create this more informative content that helps guide a customer down the path to know what they want to buy and know that they want to buy it from you. Instead of writing these crappy posts that are like "learn more about the new Jeep Wrangler." Why would Google display your crappy 350 word blog post about the 2024 Jeep Wrangler that doesn't even have a paragraph of helpful information? And it's all about how your dealership rules and you've got a shiny new showroom and people should come buy from you. That's not the question you're answering. And if someone is looking for general high level information about the new 2024 Jeep Wrangler, guess what the Jeep website is?

What's going to get displayed? Not your dealership website. So don't write that content unless you're pairing that with the social strategy and you're creating that content because that's your landing page for a social campaign. Okay, then you're okay. But if it's just a pure SEO play, that type of content isn't going to work in the new world.

How important is Google Business Profile today?

It's actually a dealership's home page now because anyone looking for the dealership by name, they're going to see the business profile and a lot of information on that business before they get to the website or if they find them in a Google map search or they show in the map pack with the map and the three results, and a properly optimized and well optimized profile lets you show up in those map searches more often.

It's really important to have one that's optimized correctly and hardly any dealers optimize them the right way because the dealers don't know how to do it the right way. The vast majority of vendors out there don't know how to do it the right way either, because automotive SEO is this kind of incestuous pool. Everyone just does the same stuff that they've always been doing because that's what they see everybody else doing, and nobody's really hopped out of that little pond to go look at the ocean of SEO instead and learn based on how we know or how people have figured out the algorithm works instead of just going, "well, I know it looks at keywords and it's important, and that's what we've been doing for 20 years, so let's just keep doing that."

I think this is going to really kind of affect what dealers have out there as options. I think some of these SEO companies are going to be struggling a lot in the next year or two because those outdated strategies that they've been offering for years just aren't going to work anymore.

What industry is doing SEO content right?

Though it's not exactly a 1 to 1 ratio, I think probably personal injury attorneys in North America are the most knowledgeable and the most aggressive with their SEO strategies. But a lot of the things that you would do as an attorney you couldn't do as a dealer. And there are things that dealers are able to do, specifically with their business profiles, that lawyers aren't able to do. So there really isn't an industry where you can go, just go do it exactly like that. 

It's more about, you know, I go to a couple, you know, I speak at a lot of conferences outside of automotive, and that's why I was in Australia. That's why I'm going to Europe. And every once in a while I'll see a marketing team at a digital marketing conference that's not an SEO conference. I had a really great conversation with five or six people from the Leith team at a conference in one of the Carolinas. I think it was North Carolina. I don't even remember it was last fall, but I was really surprised and I was like, Hey, nice job, guys. You're going to a conference that's not an automotive conference to learn more about SEO because you're not really going to learn that much about SEO at an automotive conference. And they've got their own internal team that handles stuff so it makes sense to do that. And I've seen I go to MozCon in Seattle every summer and I've seen some dealer groups that will send their teams there, but I think that only makes sense as something to do if you're a group and you've got your own internal marketing team that's handling your marketing because if you're an individual rooftop or just a rooftop that's part of a group but the group kind of lets the dealers operate independently and they don't have their own internal team, I don't know if it makes as much sense to send your marketing person off to some SEO conference to learn more SEO because you don't have anybody on staff doing SEO. That marketing director's job is to do to coordinate all the vendors for SEO and PPC and traditional and offline and video and social and all these other things, so I don't know if that's going to be as effective either. The one thing I would say, though, is there are a lot of conferences out there that you can buy virtual tickets to now or you can buy the video package so you don't have to go attend the conference. Pubcon is a really great conference, has been around for a long time to teach dealer or that that is specifically focused on SEO and PPC. brightonSEO is my favorite conference series in the world and it happens twice a year in on the south coast of the UK, but they have now brought over a U.S. version, and so in November they're going to do the second year of brightonSEO U.S. version in San Diego. That one's a great one. MozCon is pretty good. You've got SMX, which is all virtual now, which makes it easy for dealers to attend. And then you got a lot of regional things. You've got Engage in Portland. So anything on the West Coast that's a smaller, more intimate show, that's digital marketing focus. Salt Lake City has their own, Dallas has their own called State of Search. Minneapolis has one called MN search. So there's a lot of different smaller local conferences that dealers might be able to find that wouldn't be as expensive and are probably only a day or two and maybe not even going to require it would require travel.

I always encourage dealers that want to learn more to break out of of automotive and go learn real SEO at an SEO conference.

What questions should a dealer be asking an SEO vendor?

I've got a whole like marketing document that we put out at conferences that is literally this. It's what questions do you ask when you're trying to choose a new vendor and Australian jetlag kicking my butt.

You definitely want to ask what is the ratio? Well, ask first: Do they have a typical agency set up or a boutique set up? Those are the two different ways that any marketing agency is going to be set up and a typical agency set up means that there are teams of different people that will do different tasks, like some writers, some coders, some technical optimizers.

But you want to ask, are they set up like that or are they set up like a boutique agency where one person is going to do everything for you? You also need to find out, are you going to be interfacing and dealing with an account manager that doesn't actually do the work? Or do you talk directly to the person that does the work, because that's obviously a much better conversation and a much better approach to customer service when you let them talk to the people that are doing the work. You definitely want to find out what the ratio is. I mean, it's easy when it's one person doing everything for you, but even if it's an agency set up, you can say, what's the average number of dealers each individual person has to work with?

So you take somebody off the content team. What's the average number of dealers every month that that person is writing content for? And there's a lot of providers in automotive where that number is 65 plus, and there's one really major. I don't know if I can name names, but like the biggest provider out there, owned by a company with three letters in the name, their SEO team is responsible for dealing with 100 plus dealers per month. There's only 160 hours in the month, and one of those hours is the phone call that you get. So you're getting 20 or 30 minutes of work outside of that time. That's a really big indicator right off the bat of how much time are they going to actually be spending for the money that you're paying. 

I would also ask what are the actual deliverables around what that provider is giving you on a monthly basis, because a lot of them use kind of shady language and they'll say, well, you'll get up to four pieces of content, but a couple of months in, you don't even get a piece of content at all and they start to give you a bunch of B.S. about, well, we had some more important things to do over here this month, so we didn't do content, but we'll get back to it because at a minimum you need content every month.

You got to make sure that your provider is doing link building and make sure they're doing link building the right way, because having links from other websites pointed to your website is a really big signal to Google. Because Google's using its local algorithm to return results related to dealerships, that means they need to be doing local link building. So getting links from local businesses and local websites and not just going out and filling out forms on directory sites. 

Your Google business profile should definitely be included with what they do. You want to make sure that they're like, We talked about a minute ago, writing the right kind of content that really answers questions and isn't just simple one word answers. Make sure that business profile is fully optimized. Make sure they're doing everything with it. And you really should make sure that reputation management is included as part of the SEO service. And that's a really big shot for a lot of dealers when I say that, because in automotive reputation management is a separate service and it's a separate vendor and a separate toolset from what you're doing with SEO, because reviews are really important and I'm not saying they're not, but reviews are so important and they're a massive part of Google's local algorithm that if you're talking about showing up in the map pack or Google Maps, they're like the second most important signal, the second heaviest signal, so having an SEO strategy that doesn't include reviews and reputation management is severely lacking, and it doesn't mean, hey, I'm okay if I use this vendor that does everything but reviews because I'm using another review vendor too, because it needs to be a cohesive strategy all together in one place. So also you want to make sure that they're not outsourcing stuff overseas. 

You would definitely ask them, are they using AI to write content? And if so, that's not necessarily a bad thing. But find out, are they using human editing on top of that or are they just using ad aid to write the content and posting it? Because if they're not using human editing, that's going to get you in trouble.

What are your thoughts on GA4?

It's definitely different. I think it's better. A lot of people are freaking out because the interface is different. Sure. Any time something changes that you've had for a long time, you're going to freak out. 

But the underlying reason that they changed it is old analytics didn't measure things correctly for the way that people use the internet and apps today. New GA4 for which really is just Google Analytics at this point. The new version of Google Analytics measures things correctly and measures them in a way that isn't going to be broken any more, so you get a more realistic view of what's going on and you have the ability to go in and really dial in and do some things that you couldn't do before. So I think it's awesome. I just think it's a humongous learning curve because it is so different and it doesn't have all those prepackaged reports that everybody loves.

But I think it's a good product. It's still evolving. There's stuff getting added to it. I've got several friends that are big speakers as well and they talk about GA4 all the time and they love it. And I've talked to them and they've kind of swung me in the direction from going in. This sucks, it's new. I just don't even care because like, I don't need it in this role anymore, so I'm just not going to learn it. Now I'm actually kind of wanting to learn it and take some courses on it because you can do some really cool stuff with it.

SearchLab Digital upcoming study.

We're about to release our two year study. We spent two years studying several thousand dealership business profiles. Basically we ran Ford dealers Chevy dealer, Jeep dealer, Kia dealer, something else Dealer, and used car dealer in 14 different markets. And when you see the map pack, you see the map and the three results and then you can click a button to view more results or more places or more locations, whatever that button says, that takes you to what's called the local finder page, and that's the map pack but beyond the top three, it's everything that matches your query. 

We looked at positions one through 20 for all of those cities, for all of those brands for two years. And once we took out all the department listings that were showing up and anything that was showing up, that was like some other business that picked a bad category and we're just looking at actual dealership profiles, we ended up with over 2700 profiles. This study is basically meant to use data to prove what works with SEO and what doesn't. 

For at least ten years or so, any time you're reading anything about automotive SEO or seeing somebody present about automotive SEO at a conference, including me, it's been somebody up on stage saying, Here's how this stuff works, do this, do this, do this, do this. And you have to trust that that person knows what they're talking about and is giving you good advice. And most likely they are because they're on stage at an event, but you don't really know if this stuff works for you or not. So I wanted to take a different approach to SEO and do a study to say, "Look, these are all the best practices that everybody says will affect your visibility in search results. Do the numbers actually match in reality?" 

I didn't want to go down the super math nerdy, like let's get statistical relevance and say specifically which factors weigh more than others, because it's way too complex. I wasn't trying to do that. I was just trying to prove, "Hey, look, everybody says that primary category is more important than anything else, so if we're looking at primary category, do the guys that ranked number one have a better category selection than the guys at number ten? If the data backs that up and says yes, well then that's probably true. And then, you should have all ten categories filled out if you're a car dealer because there's more than ten categories that apply.

The guys at number one versus the guys at number ten, did the guys at number one have more categories filled out? Guess what they did? Review scores. If you have a higher review score, should that help? Guess what it does. So a lot of these factors that everyone has said is best practice. You have to trust it, now we can actually prove that this stuff is legitimate. I'd like this is really important stuff. So hopefully now that that we're going to be I'm trying to get this finished up by the end of this month, to have it written up and on the blog, but it may move into April. But now that we'll publish this study, I think it's kind of a new approach to automotive SEO where you're now looking at, okay, here's data that shows me I need to do these things, not just here's a list of 25 things I need to do at a conference, and I go home and at three or four of them. Now, this data shows you all of these things are important. Go do these things.

Discover a world where leadership meets innovation in the automotive industry. "DrivingSales Defining Leadership" podcast episode dives deep into the art of leading a team to excellence. With insights from industry experts, J.D. Mixon, Bart Wilson, and special guest, Mel Wilson, Fixed Ops Director of Goode Ford in Burley, ID, learn how to revitalize your leadership approach and steer your dealership toward success.

Empowering Teams for Transition:

In this episode, we explore the essence of transformative leadership and its impact on team dynamics. Learn how to cultivate a culture of empowerment, where every team member feels valued and motivated to contribute their best.

Strategies for Success:

Dive into practical strategies that can help you navigate the challenges of the automotive industry. From employee development to leveraging human capital, discover how to optimize your team's performance and drive sales.

Cultivating a Winning Culture:

Uncover the secrets to building a resilient and adaptable team culture. Learn how consistency in training and accountability can forge a path to success, making your dealership a beacon of excellence in the automotive sector.

Join us as we explore these themes and more, providing you with the tools you need to lead with confidence and achieve remarkable results.

Mike Dececco, Vice President of Business Development at Fullpath, talks to us about the emerging trend in automotive: CDPs. He reviews the value they provide in sales and service marketing and provides specific examples of how it can supercharge new sales as well as retention in your dealership.

Can you define a CDP?

CDP is another acronym that dealers need to learn now, which is always frustrating. But honestly, what it does is it takes all of the disparate data sources that a dealer is currently using. So CRM, DMS, website data, service data, anything we can get our hands on, chat data, whatever it might be, pulls all of that into one place, analyzes it extensively, cleans all the data, and then can execute outbound messaging to consumers based on an audience that they may fall in. It's a lot more than just marketing automation. A CDP can give dealers the ability to pull unique lists of customers based on certain criteria that they can take action on. 

So think about it as if you're sitting there as a General Manager and you're looking around the dealership and saying, Why isn't everybody on the phone right now? The showroom isn't full. Who do we call and why? So with the CDP, when you pull all of the data together, you can tell a story to a salesperson to load their lips to make a phone call. One of the main reasons that people don't pick up the phone and make a call is because they don't know what to say and they don't know what to say because they don't have all the information to feel confident about having a conversation.

Think about this example. If you're a salesperson in a dealership and the CDP could give you a list of, hey, here's all the people that are in a positive equity position. Here are all the payments that they could possibly have on all of the inventory that we currently have in stock. And here are all the VDPs that this person recently viewed. So now you can actually make a phone call that you have all the information. Hey, Steve, I realize that you're driving a 2017 Tahoe, and you might want to be careful, right? There's a little bit of a creep factor here because you have all the information. So you know that in this particular instance, Steve has been on your website and they're looking at new Tahoes. So it's, hey, you're in a positive equity position on your Tahoe, were given top dollar for trades right now and I've run some payments for you on some new Tahoes just in case you're interested in having those conversations. Now, you know that they're interested because they're already showing that intent by viewing those VDPs. So the power is the correlation of data. If you know somebody is on the website, that's one thing. But if you know that they've been on the website and they're also in a positive equity position and you have the talk tracks to reach out and communicate to that person proactively, that's kind of where the rubber meets the road.

That's just one example of what a CDP can do, but you can also do some really interesting other things like active advertising suppression. So for example, if you're integrated with call tracking into your CDP, if somebody calls and makes a service appointment for two weeks from now, you don't need to advertise to that person for service, because the job's already done. You've already booked the service appointment. The CDP can shut down advertising and suppress advertising to certain people who have already transacted. The same thing holds true on the sales side. So if somebody just bought a car, if you're connected to the DMS, you know that that transaction occurred and you're connected to the advertising as well and the audiences, then there's no reason to serve somebody advertising after they've already purchased a vehicle.

We see it happen all the time, not just in automotive but in other industries. I recently bought a golf club and I'm still being followed like 45 days later for the exact golf club that I've already purchased. The reason why that's happening is because the company that I bought the golf club from doesn't isn't connected to the transaction. They don't know that I purchased the club. I'm still in their retargeting cycle. Right? So if you connect all the dots, that's when it gets really, really cool and you can save a bunch of money and you've got a whole bunch of really unique insights.

What is the relationship between a CRM and CDP?

I can't speak to our product development roadmap, but I don't foresee us going into the CRM space. It is a very crowded space and it's a very mature space. There are a lot of really great players that we are partnered with in that space, and we don't really have any interest in going after that.

What we're here to do is to help the CDP talk to the DMS, talk to the service scheduler, and talk to the call tracking. Think about us as the data layer that makes sense of all of those different products. We don't want to change a dealer's behavior necessarily. We want to give them all the information to make the behaviors that they're doing more effective.

You can imagine if you're working in a CRM and a CDP at the same time, the CRM isn't connected to the DMS, so it can only give you the insights that it has available based on the consumer's activity or inbound outbound communications between the consumer and the salesperson. But the DMS has all the transactional data, right? If you connect that together in a CDP layer, now you know this person has a much higher lifetime customer lifetime value than somebody else. That gives you insights when you're reaching out to particular leads. You're going to likely treat a lead differently That's bought four cars from you and has $1,000,000 worth of lifetime customer value than a fresh lead off the street that you have never had any business with. What the CDP does is connect all that data together to give you the information, but it's not a place where you're directly outbound communicating to customers all that often. The CRM is still the best place to do that.

How do you approach data hygiene in the dealership?

Yeah, that's a great question. What will work with third parties, anybody that's in the space, Experian, Equifax, or whoever can help us clean the data. 

I think your point is a really good one. I think it actually starts at the dealership. Going back to my Dealer.com days, we had a proprietary CRM. Our own kind of CRM, we called it DNA because we need another acronym, right? So we called it DNA, but we had a saying and it's just like a lot of organizations do now, if it's not in DNA, it didn't happen.

What we need to do is help dealers understand that the minute things that might not feel important, like making sure you get that email address double-checked, making sure you got that phone number, double check the address of the consumer, all of those things, we want to make sure that the dealership has a process in place to ensure that their employees understand, that getting that accurate data in the system is going to ultimately benefit them in the future. It's not just because we're being a pain in the neck. When they understand that all of that data is going to be leveraged on their behalf to generate more opportunities, then they pay more attention. And so it's kind of like a systemic issue in automotive is like crap data in crap results out, so we definitely do a lot of work to help the dealers clean up those databases so that we can effectively start to market to those consumers.

The impact of closed vendor platforms.

I think it's taken so long to get there to get to this place, and I think it's because automotive, just speaking from all my experience in the space, has generally been a whole bunch of walled gardens. This company doesn't have an integration with this company because they compete in this way or this company doesn't have an integration with this company and doesn't want to play in that space because they compete in this other way. And I think we've seen outside of automotive that a really robust ecosystem of open APIs is how you make a CDP really effective.

One of the things that we're focused on at FullPath is being very, very, very open with our data. For example, a dealer can set up APIs and directly send their audience data to other providers. We don't necessarily care if they're using somebody else for their digital advertising. We'll make sure that that provider gets the data they need to effectively execute. I think that's kind of a system problem that we've had in automotive is people kind of holding on to their space and a very walled garden. And we're starting to see now more and more companies standing up really robust APIs so that dealers can leverage the stuff that they're doing with that company in all of their other strategies, and when that happens, everybody benefits,

It’s time for open integration.

What's happening is, you know, there's so much available, but without consolidation, there will be no execution. So all these systems have to talk to one another. And, you know, in automotive, we're always behind, right? Or we're like 7 to 10 years behind the rest of the world. We're getting there now. All throughout my career, it's like I've had numerous scenarios where a dealer says to me, Well, hey, you know, I use this other company. Why can't you guys just have a conversation and figure out the way that we should do this? And that happens every single day in our space. That's part of the reason why I joined FallPath because the CDP is an open platform that accepts and transmits data in an effective way so others can leverage it. 

It's really going to be the third pillar moving forward. You've got the CRM, the CDP, and the DMS, and those three things are kind of the core fundamentals, but the CDP can interact with all of those ancillary systems that the dealer is using and then inform them based on all of those signals that it's getting from all these other areas. It can inform partners on how to engage with that consumer or it can inform Fullpath ourselves to be able to engage with that consumer.

But it's really just about what's the right thing for the consumer. What's the best experience and the best experience for the consumer and the best experience for the dealer in the same regard is an open relationship between all of the vendors that they work with so that the dealer's best interests are always at heart.

It's one of those things where it's been very fragmented for very many years. And you've seen huge players in the space that have acquired many companies and tried to put them all together to create this. And it hasn't happened yet. It requires a third-party disruptor that's unencumbered by all of these legacy revenue streams and things like that to be able to say, hey, there's a problem and we're just going to fix it and we're not going to worry about we don't want to do that because we have this other company over here that competes with this or competes with that. We're not encumbered by any of that. And the CDP players are the ones that are walking in with open arms as opposed to cross arms.

What pushback do you get from dealers?

First of all, they don't necessarily understand what it does. It's not necessarily a tool that you're in all the time and clicking around and using it for a million different things. We're starting to build that into the CDP now. It's evolving into a more, you know, dealer active tool, but the pushback we get is, well, I already have a lot of this stuff in my CRM or I already have a lot of this stuff in my DMS. We say that, yes, you do, but they don't talk to one another. It's like your DMS speaks French and your CRM speaks Japanese. We're the translator We'll pull those two things together and make sense of it and give and give you a way to actually leverage the insights when you actually have those data sets connected because it gives you tremendous power when you pull all of that stuff together.

How should a dealership be structured to maximize the value of a CDP?

The cool part about it is that most of what happens in the CDP is automated. They don't necessarily have to have processes in place other than I would say that, you know, speaking from experience, I would say, make sure that you're getting as clean data as you possibly can into your systems. That's going to save you frustration down the line for having to append and make sure that you're cleansing all of that data.

You're going to have to do that sporadically anyway, right? It's never going to be perfect. So the first piece is what's going into the system? Are you doing a really good job getting in there? The second thing is,that you don't really have to think too much about what to do with it once you've stood up the CDP layer. 

Because that's what the CDP does. It pulls all the data together and if you're using, let's say, Fullpath for digital advertising, our digital advertising is being powered by all the audiences and different customer categories that are being that are being stood up every day. All of those audiences are being refreshed every day because one day somebody might be a new lead, and the next day they might have had an appointment, so they're in a different bucket. All of that is happening automatically. They don't really necessarily need to change their in-store process in any way, but they can rest assured that because the data is all being put into one place and organized, their consumers are getting the right message at the right time.

And then anything that's happening in the CRM or a BDC where people are making phone calls, that's all gravy, right? That's all icing on the cake because the CDP is doing all the hard work of who is this customer, what have they done, and what they need to see now based on their last activity.

The core kind of tenets of what a CDP is, (everybody wants to be a CDP these days. We were and we were we were just at NADA, we've got 20 new CDPs that just popped up in the last month and a half because CDP is in the zeitgeist). The core competencies are a customer record that shows everything that the customer has done since the beginning of time. Every transaction, every ad they've clicked on, every email they've opened, every VDP they viewed, every transaction they've had with the dealership, including the grosses and everything. It shows everything about a singular view of a customer from the beginning of time that they interacted with you because we'll go back 7 to 10 years of data to pull all of that out. Since the beginning of time, everything that they've ever done with the dealership. and then does the previous action dictate the next marketing action or the next action to be taken? Those are kind of the two core tenets of what a CDP does. And I don't think a dealer really has to do much. I mean, other than sit back and count cash.

How can a dealership clean up their data?

There are two ways to do it right. You can work with there's a myriad of data companies in automotive. I named a few at the beginning of the conversation. Any one of those companies can you can bang your current and it sounds terrible, but you can bang your current database up against that and it will append and refresh and make sure all of that data is clean. You can do that, you know, as often as you like, but if you do it, it's not necessarily inexpensive to do, right, because you're talking about huge datasets.

But if you do that, you don't want to have to do that all the time, so when you're signing up for a CDP, get your data cleaned up, make sure everything's good to go spend whatever it takes to make sure that that's right. Because if the data is right, then everything will be right. Then instill a process in the store and let people know, Hey, guys, we can't have a customer@dealership.com anymore, right? This is something we have to ensure that we're doing because it affects them individually. If you're putting the wrong data in and you're the service advisor and that customer's not getting your service emails, then that customer is not coming in for their next service to see you and you don't get the next opportunity to upsell that customer, which is part of your job as a service advisor.

They all roll up and talk to each other. It's all important. So clean it up first and then put a process in place to ensure that your people are doing what they need to do to make sure that the data is correct. And then you'll have to do that much less often than your initial setup.

Dealers should have a strong data collection process.

You can save yourself a lot of expense by having a really nice process in the store for ensuring that as you're onboarding new employees at the store, say, Hey, this is our policy, this is how we do it. There are no exceptions. You have to collect the email address, you have to collect this, you have to collect that. There are no exceptions. 

And then I mean, any dealer should have a really strong data collection policy at this point, because you set it right and think about what's sitting in all of these systems. You've got decades of highly relevant customer information and customer activities directly in your DNA. You've got the Holy Grail. If you just nail your data strategy and can communicate with the customers you've already spoken to effectively, then you don't have to spend nearly as much money going out and acquiring new ones. You've already spent all of this money out, $600 on average, right, to sell a vehicle. You spent all of that money already to generate all these leads. It makes a lot of sense to just focus on the house as the core of your strategy. How do we take the customers we've already done business with and ensure they come back for service and they come back for their next car so we don't have to spend 600 bucks again to acquire a new customer?

How can a CDP impact retention?

Retention is the nucleus. It's the reactor. You know, it's the thing that's powering everything, and that's why the CDP is important because it's not siloed.

So you can leverage data out of your CRM. It's great. You can export a customer list, you can do all kinds of stuff like that. It's fun, right? But if you don't have the DMS data and the service data, all the phone calls that customer made and all the chats that they had, reviews that they've left, everything is consolidated in that customer record, then more often than not, you're going to send the wrong message at the wrong time than if you had all the information to send the right message.

It's so common `sensical. It's kind of crazy, right? Before you reach out to the customer automatically, you know, if it's automated or it's not, make sure you have the right information. Not rocket science. 

It's just like anybody in any sales job has ever done. Right before you pick up the phone and you call somebody, you've got to know some things. Cold calls are difficult, but when you make cold calls, I did it back in the day at a dealer, I'm looking at a dealer's website and I'm figuring out who this person is I need to talk to and what are they like and what is their job. You have to have some information to actually have a productive conversation or have a productive interaction. 

The same thing holds true when you're reaching out

to the customers that you already have. You don't want to send them a direct mail about a car that they haven't owned for four years. That is a waste of your money and it's a waste of their time and it's a bad look for you.

So get your data house in order and leverage it. And you're going to find that you're going to have to spend a lot less money acquiring new customers because you're doing such an amazing job keeping the ones you've already had.

How does Fullpath use AI? 

If you were to think about the core data as, like the nucleus, and then outside of that you have an AI layer that is analyzing all the activities that are occurring or all those many tens of hundreds of thousands of customers and determining which bucket that customer goes into all the time.

I might one day submit a lead to the dealership. So I submit a lead, but I don't anybody back. I don't do anything. Then I'm on the VDP. Now, we looked at the VDP, so I'm getting retargeted. That's very basic. But now let's say that I get an email that was sent to me because the dealership collected my email address when I submitted the lead. Now I click on that email. My identity is completely resolved, so now they know who I am. They know I've been connected, all my data is connected and they know that I'm Mike Dececco, right? The AI knows that Mike Dececco likes to buy Audis. He's looked at these four Audis in the last three months. What it can also do is pull together data points from other areas. So, for example, let's run payments on all of these Audis that Mike just happened to be looking at, and let's send him an email with these three vehicles that he looked at with payments for 48, 60, and 72 months, by the way, and here's the lease on the new cars that you looked at. AI can develop all of that for us and send those messages automatically. 

And that's where everything's going. It's super rad not to date myself, but it's super rad.

What is the future of CDPs?

I think when we go to NADA in three years, you're going to see a completely consolidated customer view across all tiers in automotive. And I think that's where it's going, right? We're talking to an untold number of manufacturers right now about, hey, like dealers got all of this fantastic data, right? We have all of these incredible incentives and all these things that we need to make sure get pushed down to tier three, but not just down like the way it's been right now. Mostly is like, hey, you know, here is a really incredible offer on whatever vehicle it is, and let's make sure if send that offer out to all the website providers and then all the website providers have to update the information on all the sites. 

So I think we're going to see a huge amount of cooperation between the tiers. You're going to see and we're doing this already for some manufacturers, regionalized incentives being displayed specifically on dealers' websites automatically because we're getting a feed that's coming down from tier one and then we can disseminate that based on region, based on individual dealer offers. If they have an offer that's better than the regional offer, we're going to see this coordination between the tiers. I want you to think about a scenario. Imagine it's 2028 and you go to Kia.com. You're already a customer. You're already driving a Kia and you land on Kayak.com because you're curious about the new Kia models.

Right now, you can open up a chat and say, hey, you know, are you a current customer? Yes, I am. Give us some information about you. What's your name? Maybe the last for your social. I don't know. I'm just spitballing here, but I want you to think about what the scenario could be. Okay. Here's my information. We all know that the next generation of consumers are very willing to just give out. It's all about convenience. Make it easy. 

So cool. Here's all my information. Now, you could directly pipe in key financial services data. You pipe in their insurance data, you could pipe in everything and literally create deals and hand fully baked deals to the dealership because you used AI to connect all the dots for all the players and it would make deals super easy for dealers at tier three. Not that they're not easy right now because they're slaying it, but for example, if you actually had all of that data connected from the tier one level all the way down to the tier three level, and that's where we've wanted the automotive industry to go for so long. How do we leverage that data across all these tiers to give the customer this ridiculously convenient experience where they just buy a car and the dealer in their market gets the deal and they buy the car, right?

But that's not the way it is right now. It's still very, very disjointed. I have to go to tier one. I'm going to fill out a form that's going to go to the dealer. I'm going to get a totally different process from one dealer to the next. It's totally not uniform. I think we're going to see even more consolidation in the marketplace on data strategy and consumer experiences like we've seen outside of automotive.

The dealerships are not going to be changing the systems that they're using, but they're going to be extracting the data from those systems and taking action on it and making it much more effective than it is today. 

Because, I mean, I've seen it just this year. I'm talking to so many partners about integrating into the CDP. And, you know, everyone is starting to think about, hey, I really need to stand up a really robust API and it makes sure that if a dealer wants to use my widget for whatever it is the data from that widget can be leveraged in other areas inside the dealership.

That's going to be the thing that's going to change. We're going to start to see much more cooperation between vendors that understand that they become more powerful and more sticky when they play really nicely with everyone else. I think we're going to see a dramatic shift in the next few years.

Dive deep into the world of automotive service excellence with "Creating Scorecards for Service Advisors," an essential episode for anyone in the automotive service industry. Hosted by Bart Wilson, J.D. Mixon, and Craig Wilson, this episode of "DrivingSales Defining Leadership" podcast provides a comprehensive guide on developing effective scorecards tailored to Service Advisors. Whether you're a service manager, dealership principal, or an aspiring service advisor, this episode is packed with actionable insights to elevate your team's performance, streamline operations, and significantly enhance customer satisfaction.

Chapter List:

0:00 - Introduction to Scorecards for Service Advisors

2:15 - Why Scorecards Are Essential in Automotive Service

4:30 - Key Metrics to Include in Your Service Advisor Scorecards

6:45 - Steps to Implement Scorecards Effectively

9:00 - Utilizing Scorecards to Motivate and Guide Service Advisors

11:30 - Q&A Session with Industry Experts

13:45 - Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Be sure to Like, Share, and Subscribe to our channel to stay updated with the latest in automotive service leadership.

We recently sat down with Travis Peterson, VP of Product at One View to discuss how cloud computing and cloud storage has evolved. We chat about how dealers are leveraging cloud storage and the best practices you can implement when moving your documents to the cloud.

How has cloud computing transformed document storage?

You know, as far as the dealership is concerned, their world has changed drastically. They looked at documents they had coming off that dot matrix printer for the sound effects. I even remember years of saying I just wanted to print during the day so I feel that nostalgia. But dealerships, as they've evolved, realize that there's more use of electronic signatures, and electronic storage of the documents because it's not just the retail space, it's also the security of those documents, who can touch them and access them.

A lot of the dealerships over the past few decades have been dealing with that struggle. Maybe they're getting off of paper and they're trying to get into scanning or they've scanned paperwork and they're trying to figure out how they evolve into a digital age of all of their documents being stored in a different storage system that's easily retrievable across the dealership.

So the evolution of dealerships and how they transition their paper for their digital asset is very important.

Document storage and security.

The concern is how people have access and what are the security controls. I remember my days a long time ago being in banking and the fact that you had to have two signatures to take cash from the vault.

And the reality is how much money, maybe digital or people's data that goes through a dealership is kind of the reason why dealerships have been pressured into that financial institution regulations. What dealerships have to do.

How can cloud storage help with document organization and accessibility?

You think about your laptop, you sync it up to Dropbox, you sync it up to some cloud solution. The reality is, if I'm just throwing the files into the file cabinet, it does no good when I want to go and retrieve them. So you have to have them organized in a way where it's VIN-specific, customer-specific, and relationally. you want to be able to pull all those data points together when you're trying to find something related to a legal situation or a deal and you need to make sure that everything we needed substantiated and we have it. Or everything that is there, someone requests us to delete it. We need to be able to know that we are confident in our ability to go out and delete all of the data that needs to be deleted for that client.

Why has automotive retail been slow to adopt cloud storage?

I think that COVID was a big driver, a big push. But I think that a lot of people have just lived with paper as being the tangible asset to be able to work through a car deal or the tangible asset to provide proof. Franchises for a long time harped on the fact that you had to have the physical piece of paper in your hands, and if you didn't have that physical piece of paper. how is it going to be real? Manufacturing that paper and pulling it back out and saying, yeah, a piece of paper is legitimate enough for me to consider it to be the original.

A lot of dealerships are scared and have been scared, honestly over the past few decades. Just knowing, "Am going to be good for the franchise asks? Am I going to be good if the IRS calls? Am I going to be good, protected is a better way of saying good, but am I going to be protected in this situation when I have to produce that document or whoever is requesting it? And will they question that process or will they question the validity of the paperwork?"

I think the challenge in my mind is I think about it is how many times have we taken our kids to the doctor and have no paperwork anymore to fill out. They adopted that quite a while ago. In banking, what kind of digital solutions do we have in place now where we don't really go into the brick-and-mortar anymore for a bank? And things became digital and we stayed with that, whereas we're in the dealership and now we've got paperwork that we have to fill out. We've got deal jackets that are still paper and we're trying to figure out how we're going to store them in the file cabinets.

How do customers feel about data security and protection?

I always joke that there are just different generational situations. You may have a parent who is all about technology and wants to embrace it as much as they can. And then you're going to have another parent that says, I don't want to. I mean, I'm a parent that has lots of different apps just to keep track of stuff. And there are some days where it'd be nice if I just got one sheet of paper that told me everything that's going to happen this week. 

But that's just people's perceptions of technology. If the idea of me keeping organized and having all of the data at my fingertips is something that I'm okay with, and I think that that comes down to that security factor. If the dealership is okay with that security and knows all of the documents that are going to be stored are going to be secure, then I think that changes the factor for people acknowledging and accepting a digital cloud solution for storing their documents.

And the other side of that coin is going to be someone who says, I don't trust that I don't want my data out there stored in some system that I don't have access to. They want to control that. So some people are going to be safer or feel safer keeping it at the dealership in a file cabinet. They just don't know what they don't know about the security controls that exist in the dealership

How to you protect the dealership documents? 

It's a partnership between the dealership and us because the dealership has employees, so then we have to extend to the dealerships the fact that we need legitimate user access. We need people to have real emails. We don't want to have just random logins to the system. We want everything to be secure. So we're going to use MFA technology to make sure that people are logging in and accessing it in a secure manner.

We're going to make sure that our system is using proper encryption technology and APIs that are going to connect the user to the images that they're trying to look at or that they're accessing. But something that you mentioned is all about the redundancy of the data, and the reality is, is going back to that paper now, this paper that I have here in my hand, the one copy, that's the only copy. We use a system that can store a daily backup, a weekly backup, and a monthly backup. There's just multiple iterations of that backup being capped, and that gives you more confidence. From my perspective, I'll jokingly say, that if I were to go back to my cell phone and say, How many times are the images or the photos of my kids back up on there? That's an important thing to me, and I want to make sure that this paperwork: service deals, parts, app checks, whatever it is that is put into a digital file cabinet that is backed up multiple times with secure redundancy that only the people that need to access it are able to access it.

How cloud storage can help with dealership compliance

Another point of that, I mean, you brought up credit compliance. In my opinion, choosing a vendor that can store that without printing it isn't an even bigger piece of the puzzle. Why would I want to put it on that piece of paper that goes on to the edge of the desk that someone can walk by and just pick up? I remember when I was in the dealership, the red flag compliance training that we went through, making sure that there was no paperwork on my desk and that everything was cleaned up. That's a big key and that's great. But why not just circumvent that process completely and just have that data never go into a paper format?

Are most dealers scanning and uploading documents or electrically managing them?

It all depends on the DMS. Frankly, We're kind of talking about the deals or finance. So yeah, if a dealership is doing the contracting, they're really focused on that.

But then a call that I had this morning was about how I figure out all these systems that I'm using to produce a deal. And I jokingly say, What's in the deal? We'll see with our clients that the average deal is 60 pages if all are printed out. The question is how many systems did you use electronics systems to produce 60 pages of paperwork? Some of them are a digital e-signature. So that is a hot topic. That's it's really something people really want to inquire about or figure out. How do I get that into my dealership? Maybe you have an E menu, or maybe your whole contract is E, but then you forget that there's other paperwork that comes from 60 pages. So maybe you consolidate 20 or 30 of those pages and get them just electronically stored. That's phenomenal. That's great. You just reduce half of the work that someone has to do scanning and the paperwork. Hopefully, you don't print those out. Hopefully, you keep them there in electronic form.

What is the value of cloud storage for fixed operations?

Fixed Ops, I think, is not looking at as much for parts, but definitely in service. Parts maybe if you have a large wholesale business you'll say, Hey, it's going to be a lot easier to retrieve the documents, look them up, look for stamps that way. But service is going to be very focused on their warranty and then the warranty processing documentation or they're going to be a situation where they're producing a lot of repair orders, a lot of paperwork that's coming out of the printers, and they want to find a way to archive and get that captured and stored.

I was working with the dealership last week. They are taking down their old building. They built a brand new one and the statement that the CFO made to me is it would have been great if we'd done this five years ago. I wouldn't be trying to figure out what to do with all this paper. So that paper, when you move from one place to the other, becomes a large storage area in your new building. If you didn't have that storage requirement, you could use it for a moneymaking situation. 

So in service, they're looking at real estate that paper consumers that they could be using instead for a revenue-generating product. Instead. So that's what we see with the service side of business as well as they're focused on the warranty. How do I know that I have everything captured for warranty paperwork should I ever get a question from my franchise? 

How cloud storage can help with a DMS switch.

It's a good question. I'm just going to speak in generalities of documents. If you were to think back to the days of file cabinets that would sit inside of a dealership, they would switch their DMS, they would change their CRM, all that information would change, but their file cabinet would stay the same. They would still store their customer's data in a secure place where everyone who needed access could go in and access it. I remember in the dealership I was at, the file cabinets were located in the office. You had to know the code to get into the office to be able to access those documents, or they were in a storage room wherever keyed control. I mean, you had to have the key and you have to get in.

But you have to realize that a lot of dealerships, as they transition through that process and store those documents, from my perspective here, we need a system that is going to make it where they can access the documents anywhere in the dealership they need to.

What processes does a dealer need to have in place?

As far as your file cabinet, imagine that I just open up a drawer and shove the documents in there. By not making sure that they're alphabetized. If I'm not making sure that they're organized by VIN or retrievable by VIN, it's going to be a challenge. But if I have added value, I know what documents should be going into that drawer of the file cabinet. And I know they went in and they're still in there. I've got a thousand repair orders for this month and I'm going to file them away into the file cabinet.

From our perspective, we know that the dealerships need an exception or they need something that's dynamic that is going to tie to the document type that they're working with today. And it's going to tie into all the documents that they need to have access to. a dealership that has that kind of checks and balances to make sure everything that went in there is a perfect way for them to know I switched my DMS. I need to go back and look at something historical. It's right over there in that drawer, in that folder. 

Well, if it's a digital cabinet like we're providing, that's a place where they can switch their DMS, and still be able to find the documents that they need. One of the challenges we've seen over time is when a dealership converts from one system to the other. They have one file cabinet regardless of the DMS, the efficiencies, find the documents, and answer the questions a lot easier. 

I just had a dealership yesterday that was looking at their accounting data and they were trying to figure out why a fixed asset changed and they needed the details for their CPA. How that's going to happen? For every dealership that switches their DMS, they need to look for the data. They need to answer a question for someone, And that could be or CPA that could be an auditor. If I can easily get to it, that's going to be important. Well, back that train up just a little bit.

I know our process of how we train people and I think that's a big thing too. What we do here is train the individuals who put the data into the system and make sure that it's a high-quality document going in. I may talk about a dealership that is still today counting every page they're scanning into the system. Is it required? No, it's not. They choose to do that because it gives them assurance. This reporter has eight pages. I scanned eight pages and I'm good to go knowing that everything is there. And that gives them confidence from the very beginning of the capture to make sure that everything is easily accessible, regardless of the DMS, regardless of how many years have gone by and I need to go back and look for the document. It's there. 

What reporting do you provide?

There's definitely reporting right at the front. There's a simplified exception report or an advanced exception report where someone can just see a chronological record of the tickets, where you can use our exception report that is going to give you that advanced perspective. It's a graphical interface. It's going to tell you what documents you closed in your DMS in a certain period of time. Click on service. Say I closed 1000 repair orders this month. I scanned 900 of them. Where's the other 100? I get them scanned in. I look at the report again. I can see regularly that all of the documents are being scanned into the system.

To me that exception report is key. Your accuracy in the process that you put in place. I've had people on my system switch, then they don't have that visibility anymore and they feel like they're floundering. They don't know why. I was told I scanned everything with an exception report that's right up front, right in people's faces lets people know what is being scanned and what is missing is very important to the production they're accessing. Whether it's fixed, whether it's variable, accessing those documents that they need at the dealership.

Who is scanning the documents in the dealership?

 The same person who would be filing the documents today is typically the person I would recommend be the person scanning the documents. But it's going to be the last person who touches the document ideally. When I'm finished. If it's someone who is finished with the title work on a deal, it would probably be the best person suited to scan the deal. If it's a service person who brings everything to a cashier, maybe I'm going to scan there. 

I had a store up in the northeast. They had service advisors, as soon as they finished with that repair order, they were able to scan it right in from a terminal that is centralized to them, get everything scanned at one spot. So every dealership's going to do it just a little bit differently and you don't have to hire someone to do that job. It's just all about setting it on a scanner and quickly scanning it. 

When it comes to who is going to look at that report, I'm going to recommend that it's management right up front. I'm going to recommend that it's a controller or CFO who has visibility and is aware of that on a monthly basis. I can recommend that it's a service manager, a finance manager that's looking at the exception report for their deal genre, wherever they're at. If it's fixed. I'm looking at service, if it's sales, I'm looking at the deals, because when I need to go back and look at that document, I want to know the system was there to protect me and I'm in control, or I'm directing the person that is routing those documents through the channel.

I don't need to hire anyone else to do it. It's a short, quick report that people are going to look at, whether it's 5 minutes a week or 10 minutes a month. They're going to look at that report. It's a quick accountability to the process to make sure that everything that you put in place is now working and you're going to be confident when you need to go retrieve the document.

In this enlightening episode of "DrivingSales Defining Leadership," hosts Bart Wilson and J.D. Mixon engage in a profound conversation with Derrick Woolfson, the Vice President of Business Development with unparalleled expertise in revolutionizing the automotive and heavy-duty trucking sectors. Derrick shares his unique path from a fresh college graduate to becoming an instrumental figure in leveraging technology and customer relationships to drive growth and efficiency in an industry ripe with potential yet facing technological lag.

The discussion uncovers Derrick's strategic approach toward customer relationship management, the critical role of establishing a BDC, and the evolution of digital advertising strategies in maintaining a competitive edge. The trio delves into the necessity of building a strong corporate culture, emphasizing employee retention and development to navigate the challenges of a tight job market and the technician shortage. Derrick's insights into the significance of partnership over mere vendor relationships offer a fresh perspective on tackling industry-specific hurdles and fostering innovation.

Moreover, Derrick's narrative highlights the importance of mentorship and a growth mindset in achieving professional milestones, along with the value of listening, adapting, and executing strategies that resonate with employees and customers. This episode offers actionable strategies for automotive leadership and inspires a proactive stance on future trends, digital transformation, and the power of a united team vision.

Dive into the heart of digital innovation and consumer protection with this compelling episode of DrivingSales Insights, featuring the insightful Angelica Jeffreys from Equifax. As we navigate through the challenges and opportunities presented by online retailing, Angelica brings to light the critical issue of rising consumer fraud. She discusses the subtleties of in-person versus synthetic fraud, offering a clear view into the tactics used by modern criminals and the sophisticated strategies businesses can employ to counteract them.

But it’s not just about defense. This episode goes further, exploring how AI and Big Data are revolutionizing the way we engage with customers, offering personalized experiences that were once thought impossible. Angelica provides fascinating insights into Equifax's role in enriching dealer data, ensuring cleaner, more effective customer databases for a sharper marketing edge and improved sales tactics.

The current state of consumer fraud.

Yeah, you know, it's very interesting. One of my coworkers was a victim of fraud just this weekend, where a consumer stole her identity and walked into a dealership in the Atlanta area to buy a car. Everything was very suspect because it was a buy here, pay here dealer and my coworker has an exceptional super prime credit score. So the dealer got a little suspicious and called her and they arrested the woman on the spot. 

But in-person fraud is nothing new. That has been going on, somebody stealing a consumer's identity to go try to acquire, whether it's a car or an iPad or however, they're attempting to commit fraud. Where we're seeing increases in an incremental way that we haven't seen in the past is in the online shopping world. Of course, there are so many new platforms and capabilities to be able to transact online and the thieves are getting much, much more sophisticated. 

There are a lot of crime rings out there that are targeting the ability to transact online, in particular, with synthetic fraud. Synthetic is a very patient fraud. It takes some time to really build up the persona, which is pieces of different identity elements from different real people and deceased people, wherever it is they gather it together. It's very hard to detect. Although the three bureaus, Equifax, Experian, and TU, we all have solutions that can help prevent and identify when that's happening. In the next ten years, we anticipate fraud in automotive to be a $10 billion problem. And so we have a lot of our partners coming to us asking for whether it's first party, third party, synthetic, comprehensive solutions to try to waterfall into creating solutions that can address all of those types of fraud.

How do we protect ourselves and make online retailing easy for consumers?

We're all consumers, and I think we expect and almost appreciate a certain level of friction at a certain point. If you're just logging in and shopping for a car, you're not you're not expecting to be asked for certain forms of identity.

But as you're moving through the process and you're getting a little more serious and you want to get pre-qualified, for example, as part of that shopping process, you expect you're probably going to have to give some PII or the last four of a social or have your device at minimum authenticated. There are some pretty frictionless ways to do that.

And then again, as you're proceeding through that transaction and now you're saying, hey, I really do want to purchase this car, I think you're expecting a little bit more. You're going to have to provide your driver's license and expect that you're going to scan it with your phone. And there's probably going to be some level of detection to make sure that what you've provided is not a picture of a picture of when taking a picture or your cell phone that you need to upload.

So the trick there is and what our partners are looking to us to help them solve is to help us with the right solution at the right point in time, so as the consumer progresses, the expected friction that makes them feel secure and makes them feel like it's a trusted experience. It's not too soon and it's not too burdensome on them, too soon in the process.

AI and Big Data

AI is something that I think if we look at the glass half full, there's so much opportunity.

I'll give you an example of how we can help enable AI. In a lot of our non-regulated data, which is modeled data against what we call our IXI database, we acquired a business 15 years ago that essentially is a consortium of the nation's investable assets, we manage that database is about 50% of the of the investment accounts in the country.

Because of that, we know better in an aggregated way what's in people's wallets. We can understand what kind of discretionary spending you have. We know what your ability is to pay in an anonymized and aggregated way. And so when you take that data and you apply it to the many ways that you can use AI to create a custom and personalized experience for a consumer, you're layering in insights that can help inform. When you know this type of consumer comes into a funnel, AI's going to know, okay, well, they're an economic cohort 72, and they're likely to want to engage in conversation about the, the economic, the like the gas mileage, things that that our data will tell them about the consumer in addition to what they can afford. It's a much richer experience for the consumers to have the data in that API process if you will. So a lot of the conversational AI either Stella of course, who's out there, and some of these other businesses that are doing a wonderful job in using it to improve the consumer experience could make that process a lot more personalized by using data like we have with IXI. And that type of application is what we're exploring.

What is the current state of CDPs?

I think there are a couple of topics in that question because big data means a lot of things. And you're right, it's a very exciting time right now with the way that companies are able to activate the data. But I think you have to start with clean data. And dirty data is a problem right now. There are some of the capabilities of some of the DMS providers and the CRM providers that are going to need to advance so that the data that is being pushed into these CDPs has been corrected, normalized, keyed, and linked so that it is at the right level of cleanliness and accuracy to be acted upon. There are a lot of partnerships and providers that really need to come together to help create that foundation of clean data. And so dealers really need to try to figure out, okay, who am I going to partner with to help with that?

And so finding a partner who is familiar with how to correct and normalize and key and link the data is going to be key. The second piece to that on the activation side is I think the industry really has to come together to determine, okay, what role does the CDP play, what role does the agency play and what role do the data providers play? There's probably more that I can throw into that conversation, but really in trying to activate in the most efficient way. 

Agencies play a big role in this too, And most agencies that you have out there today are much more accustomed to a traditional advertising model. They have to kind of morph a little bit to become consultants if they're really going to support their dealer body or their OEM customers. You've got OEMs in this conversation, too. So the agency is really taking on a more consultative role to make sure that the campaigns that are being pushed out by some of these CDPs fall in line with the strategy and also are efficient in the overall deployment of the agency strategy on behalf of the OEM, of the dealer, and the data providers also to help enhance the data.

There's this conversation about first-party data and how to activate that data. And the thing to remember, even once you've cleansed the data and keyed and linked it in this piece, most dealers have a fraction of the PII or the data about the consumer. I'm going to give you my name and address. But what else do you know about me that can be used for marketing? So insightful third-party data that can be pulled into these clips can help enhance these consumer records and fill in the gaps. I mean, people move, people change their phone numbers, people have multiple email addresses, and so bringing in a source of truth that can help fill in all those gaps and then layering in third-party data that provides insights about that consumer that can help with personalization, which is what consumers expect today.

To wrap that all up, this is really to your point, your question. We're now finally at the precipice, which is what has always been the promise of digital. We've dreamed of this moment and here it is. It's really an exciting time to see this come to fruition.

How does Equifax use dealer data?

That's a great question. So Equifax does not ingest data. What we do is we work through our vendors and our third-party providers to append to the dealer's data. For example, we will get or we will give a file of the entire universe to a CDP provider who can then ingest it and use it to append to a dealer's first-party data. We do have data cleansing, banking, and linking capabilities that we will take the file in then normalize it and send it back from that perspective. We don't house any of that data. We don't keep any of that data. It is simply a file transfer keying and linking, then a cleansing process, and then it comes back.

And, of course, we're a credit bureau. We house PII on hundreds of millions of consumers and it is of the utmost importance to us to protect consumer data no matter what. It would be against every DNA cell in our makeup to do anything other than whatever we're tasked to do with that data.

What will the role of CRM be? 

Yeah, I think they play a key role in being a source of data for the CDP, and some of the CRM companies, as I understand it, are looking to become CDPs themselves or create a mechanism where they're consistently purging the data back and forth so that as the data goes out to be cleansed and linked and append a unique key is assigned to it, and it comes back in as a sort of refreshed version of that data.

They're either going to be output only or they're going to create a mechanism to have the input, cleansed, keyed, and linked household data corrected within their system. Many of them have already started down that path. Some of them have not. I think if they're going to stay relevant, they're going to have to create a mechanism to have that bi-directional correction and data coming back so that it is normalized, keyed linked, and standardized with the most recent information about that consumer.

Pent-up consumer demand

For the market analysis piece, we rely pretty much on our partners in the marketplace. We work with Cox Automotive, we work with J.D. Power for those types of trends. As I understand it, there is a good pool of consumers waiting, and I think the last number I saw was 1.8 million, of what they're calling pent-up demand. Those consumers are sitting on the sidelines waiting for pricing to come down, and interest rates to come down. And so the people that are in the market are people who aren't that price sensitive and or paying cash and or leasing. But there is a subsection of the market that is just kind of sitting on the sidelines waiting for market dynamics to shift.

You are seeing in certain pockets in the subprime consumer that really, really needs a car and very much struggling with affordability. You're starting to see strain within lender portfolios of those payments going delinquent and derogatory. But as I mentioned, we have credit trends and there's another person on my staff who really speaks to that part of how loans are performing and what that might predict for near-term and longer-term sales in the marketplace.

There is a good amount of pent-up demand, and it remains to be seen when that pendulum shifts and that group of people comes back out to the marketplace to buy.

Where will this be in three years?

So I believe that we are entering an era of efficiency and personalization for our consumers that if we embrace it we've only ever dreamed about in the past. To me, it's very, very exciting. I mean, we all know the biggest complaint from consumers is how one system doesn't talk to the other and how I started something online and I ended up in the showroom. It was completely different and it took me 3 hours, you know, to transact. That's all going to be gone in three years. I'm confident of that. It won't be a year. It won't be two years. I'm pretty comfortable saying that in three years we should be at a place where the ability to transact online and the ability to pick up that car in a showroom will be integrated in a way that makes it a much better experience for consumers. I'm very excited about that.

Targeted marketing is going to change

I think you're 100% right about that. The ability to understand exactly what the consumer has in their garage, what they can swing, when is the right time, what's important to them, and how quickly they can get from step A to step Z is really going to change significantly and to your point, AI is going to be a big part of that.

Dive into the latest episode of the DrivingSales Defining Leadership podcast, where hosts Bart Wilson and J.D. Mixon welcome Team Development Consultant, Armand Hebert. Together, they unravel the intricacies of hiring the right team members and developing leadership skills that elevate productivity beyond current benchmarks. This episode is a treasure trove for modern automotive dealerships aiming to enhance their workforce, focusing on understanding and leveraging core motivators to assemble teams that not only meet but exceed expectations.

Discover why technical skills only account for 15% of workplace success, while the lion's share hinges on people skills. Learn the art of hiring for behavioral styles aligned with job descriptions and the significance of training employees in ways their behavioral style learns best for quicker ramp-up times and heightened productivity. Armand shares his expertise in navigating the diverse motivators and values that underpin effective team development and hiring strategies.

Whether you're struggling with culture fit, motivation techniques, or refining your sales process, this episode offers invaluable insights.

Dive into the future of automotive digital marketing, featuring special guest Alex Melen, Co-founder of SmartrSites, and a trailblazer in the digital marketing world. This episode is a deep dive into the evolving landscape of SEO, paid search, and the revolutionary impact of generative AI on the automotive industry.

Why is there such a gap between paid and organic search?

So there continues to certainly be a disconnect between investment and paid and organic, which to some extent might be okay. In general, I think search marketing continues to be one of the best ways to get customers for almost any industry, especially automotive, because with search marketing, the users are self-identifying themselves as in-market. You don't have to guess whether they're in market or not in-market. you're not using third-party cookies. You're not guessing about audiences. Someone literally goes into search and says on the dealership near me? And if you don't come up and your competitor, who's twice further where it does come up, they might wind up going to your competitors. It's a very simple customer path. in terms of investment

I think if there's one thing that stays constant is the cost of paid search will continue to increase. I've seen an increase since it was 5 cents a click 20 years ago in some industries. We're paying well over $100 a click, and I know for sure that next year will be more expensive than this year. 

So in the relative cost per click, obviously, that goes up and certainly with budgets. It has become a big part of people's budgets for SEO. I think a lot of times it is kind of forgotten. And again, I wouldn't necessarily say, if you're investing 25 grand in paid search, let's invest 25 grand in SEO. But there certainly is a very big disconnect, and a lot of times SEO just gets completely forgotten and not invested in, or the dealership just checks the box of the default website provider that's not a monthly package and just sets on auto.

Cost per click is going up

Absolutely. And it's all kind of a 2 edged sword of the pay-per-click. Paid search continues to be one of the best ways to get customers, and because of that people continue to move their budgets into cost per click. So paid search on Google, and Microsoft ads, are on an auction system. You pay one cent more than the person below you. So the more people invest in it, and more expensive it becomes per click. It's becoming more expensive because it performs well and because everyone keeps investing in it. But for sure, we saw a very big jump in the last couple of years. I think even year over year it's something like a 20-25% jump in the cost per click, and eventually, the cost per click can be so expensive that it will no longer be the most effective advertising channel. And people will start looking for other ways to do it. But right now it still continues to be effective even with a higher cost per click. The ROI is still there, so that's why people do it. The market continues to be strong and continues to perform well.

Do you have any trends in consumer behavior and search? 

What have we seen in the last couple of years? Search in general continues to be the point where everyone starts their research. That continues to be to be the case.

There have been a lot of changes in the last 6 to 12 months with generative AI. Google is going to be moving their entire search experience, what they call the generative search experience. Generative AI is gonna become a bigger part of the search process. So there's a lot of changes coming. 

There are a lot of discussions about how consumers will be doing things differently. A lot of it hasn't happened yet, but we're really on the precipice of these huge huge changes where I think 2 years from now a lot of the search queries that you do on Google, or whatever search engine you use, will be answered automatically by generative AI versus searching and looking through responses and articles. There hasn't been a huge change yet, but I think we're at a very big inflection point where I think there'll be more change in the next 12 months than there probably has been in the last 10 years as it relates to how we use the Internet, how we use search, how consumers find information, how consumers find businesses, and then all of that has the potential to really be disrupted.

Generative AI and search

Microsoft's been more at the forefront of it than even Google. But if you look up Google search generative experience, they premiered this probably 9 months ago at this point, but their view of the future, and Microsoft agrees with this, is that a lot of your queries are answered. The information obviously still has to come from somewhere but any kind of informational queries, they're already kind of answering. Like, if you think, Google's been moving inside direction slowly, if you think about it with their featured snippets and things like that. For example, if you search when is sunset today, most likely will automatically give you a featured snippet as opposed to clicking through 10 different websites to try and figure out when the sunset is. Right? Queries have been going in that direction already with generative AI could just answer so much more. 

I don't know which industries have the risk of huge disruption. There are entire website networks built around recipes for cooking, for example. So if you go to Google and you search for some kind of recipe. There are all these websites to look through, and they have ads on these sites, right? Now, generatively I could give you the recipe right in the response. So there's a lot of potential for disruption. A lot of potential for change in how we search and find information.

Google, Microsoft, everyone is still really trying to figure out how this looks, and in the latest beta iterations, I've seen generative AI just become a part of the search results at the top. And it's not for all search queries. There's still a lot that you won't trigger for, but their interpretation is that generative AI could be involved in as many as 40 to 60% of search queries. 

And it kind of answers, your question, and even it could even be used in product selection. For example, I'm looking for an electric bike which brands are worth researching and shows you the brands. And Google could even have paid opportunities within generative AI. You could have liked a promoted brand. 

So that really changes. The way search works with generative AI. Now at the top. Who suffers? Organic search will have less space, paid search will have less space, and it's not necessarily do those become less important, I would say, if anything, those become more important. Where before you really want to be on page one of Google, right? I forget who started this joke with a joke, "Where do you wanna hide a dead body? Page 2 of Google." You wanna be. Page one of Google. Page 2 you get nothing. Now, it's not gonna be just page one. You want to be in the top 3 results because everything else is gonna be below the fold. I think if anything, it's gonna make PPC and SEO a lot more important, 

But for sure, so much change and disruption is coming that could influence consumer behaviors. I mean, it's to a point where I think this is the first time since Google started. By the way, when Google started, it wasn't the first to invent the search engine. But they were probably one of the bigger promoters of the concept of searching the Internet. There were a lot of players at the time. But at that time there were also a lot of companies who really thought that the Internet would be better off as a directory. So Yahoo originally promoted their directory much more than search. If you go back and look at early Yahoo, it was literally a directory of websites. At a certain point, the industry kind of shifted, and instead of being a directory website, and now became a search. So I think it's a similar huge change. For the first time since Google started, I think there really is something that could replace Google right? If Google just doesn't do anything and just ignores all that. And Microsoft, for example, makes all these strides in generative AI and, for the first time ever there's an opportunity that consumer behaviors could change so significantly that Google search is no longer something that's used. If there's a generative AI product that's better and helps people find information better whether it's ChatGPT, Microsoft, or some other company, they could come in and really steal all this business from Google. 

So obviously, Google's taking it very seriously. Now, Sergey Brin has been back since I think February. He was retired. He was on the islands. He blew back in to take control of a lot of it. So it's really an existential threat for them, which I have never seen since Google started. So a lot of very big things are coming in the next couple of months.

How will Google monetize search with generative AI?

I think it's going to be a whole different monetization piece. Google shopping is, although it's in Google ads, it's kind of separate in your Google Merchant Center. By the way, automotive vehicle listing ads also live in the Google Merchant Center, and Google has local service ads are a little different. So I think it'll be similar. 

But from the data prototypes I've seen, when you do a search that's like, I'm looking for an electric bike and this is my criteria. You ask Google that question, generative AI answers that question. Here are the choices. Somewhere in there will be a choice, and that choice will obviously still have to be an actual choice. You can't say I'm looking for an electric bike, and it's gonna show you a car instead. It has to be still very, very relevant and make sense. But I think there'll be an opportunity to buy paid listings within the AI results, and similar for a car dealership when you search for a Honda dealership near me and generative AI will tell you, "Here are the 3 local dealerships to you. I think there'll be some kind of opportunity to buy placement within the AI results. 

Google is definitely a for-profit company. They're not gonna stick generative AI at the top of search and push down the paid results that make them all the money. If you look at Alphabet as a company the majority of their profits, something like 90% of their profits come from the Google ads paid side. Everything else they do, like make phones, literally everything they do, they don't make much money from it. It's all powered by search and paid ads on search. So I agree with you that they'll definitely not jeopardize that. I think I think it'll all have a piece to play within the generative. AI, and it'll be interesting how they how they execute all of this.

How will the role of content evolve with generative AI?

Chat GPT itself, the way the product works is it has a core data set that's vetted data and the negatives of doing it that way is that it's not up to date. So the newer iterations of Chat Gp, the Beta, and the version coming after that actually is able to access the Internet and get more live data from the Internet. The current versions do that in a very, very limited way. But that, for sure, is the future, because you can't you can't have a very powerful generative AI model that uses a vetted data set that's 2 years old, which is how Chad GPT has been. 

Google's model is a little bit different where it does not have the core vetted data set, but actually does scroll a lot more. That presents a lot of questions for a lot of people. There are a lot of content creators and websites that produce lots of content that take the stance that, we don't want generative AI taking our data. They purposely block generative AI from taking their data because their interpretation is if generative AI takes our data, it will then use it in the response and not credit us. Right now there is not a good way for content creation to be to be credited with generative AI. But I do think that's gonna change. 

Aside from that, I think content becomes even more important than before. We already see it in the SEO work we do for our clients and our dealerships. We started in the last couple of years doing a lot of how-to content. Because Google really likes that kind of content.

And the way that works is, for example, I don't know how to change oil. People search and are very interested in it, and we write up articles on how to do it, and Google loves that stuff. It's to a point that most of the content we create is like that. The "how-to" content gets placed in featured snippets on Google, which means it comes up at the top. It's a featured snippet that goes into Google Home. It goes into Alexa. So you'll ask Alexa, how do you change the oil on my Lexus transmission, it'll say, as found on Prestige Lexus, which is our client website. And then it reads it off right? It's already moving in that direction. I'd really like to see content creation and websites with content get credited more. I think that's where it's going to move. I think that you'll ultimately have to credit and source where the information is coming from, and that's where it becomes powerful. If you go if you go onto Chat GPT, or to Google, or whatever you use generative AI, and say, "Help me compare the Honda Accord to the Toyota Camry, comparing the dimensions of the trunk or something like that, if you have a page on your dealership website that compares that and generative AI pulls from there and then references your website. I think that's powerful because hopefully they eventually wind up on your website. If not, they at least hear your brand since brand awareness and all those funnel metrics. So I think as generative AI becomes more prevalent, it's certain we'll need to get that from somewhere. I don't think you'll be able to have these vetted data sources like Chat GPT kind of does now because it's just going to be too old. So I think content creation could be very important, I think very good content will continue to be rewarded as Google has been rewarding for years, but obviously, authoritative content that's very relevant and good for users will continue to be rewarded, and I think will become even more important with generative AI.

Do you have some advice for marketers on how to prepare for generative AI?

I just talked about this crazy change coming. The way people search is changing. The way organic results will show up is changing, paid is changing right? I think ultimately, from a marketing SEO perspective, things are surprisingly not changing much. The same strategies have worked in the last couple of years and then will continue to work at least in 2024. All of this could obviously change quickly, but for the time being generative. AI or not, you want to be creating a lot of relevant content.

A good way to think about it is each piece of content gives you an opportunity to come up and search results. So, for example, if you made that page, comparing the dimensions of the Honda Accord to the Toyota Camry, and someone searches compared dimensions if you did not make that page, your site will never come up. Your homepage is not relevant enough, no matter how authoritative it is. You just won't come up. So every piece of content you create gives you an opportunity to come up and search results. That's the best way to approach it. You have to think about, "What are my consumers searching for" and create content around that. A lot of it is quantity. Quality is still important, but if you're creating one or two pieces of content per month, you're really not going to get much right? You're going to wait for that one person in your geographical area to search the difference in trunk sizes between an Accord and a Camry. Yes, that person's valuable, but if that's the only piece of content you created that month, you're really not going to move the needle. So content creation continues to be important. Quality content creation that's not automated junk content. Quality, content creation based on what your visitors are searching for.

The second, big piece of it is link building. Link building still continues to be very, very important for Google and other search engines to establish domain authority, so where content gives you an opportunity to come up with search results, link building helps you come up higher. By having other websites linked to you. Google now sees you as more authoritative and will rank your content higher. That's been the game plan for 10-20 years. Right? 

There's so much more that goes into it. There are technical things you should be fixing on your website your Google, and My Business profile. So much that goes in. But I think the core of content creation is to get the opportunity to come up and search results and get relevant authoritative websites to link to you. So Google thinks you're also authoritative. I think that continues to be the key to success in 2024 and for the foreseeable future

The value of original content

As things move along, that original piece of content can become extremely valuable. That's a really interesting and very debated topic in the SEO world. So when I wrote my book, I wrote it not this October but the October before. It came out, I want to say in April. But anyway, I wrote my book right before Chat GPT came out, so I wrote it myself the old-fashioned way, slaving away the keyboard. But when I wrote my book there were rumblings of generative AI coming out, and it was before they even had Chat GPT as a public tool. But I put in a couple of sentences where I said that I see it coming, and I wrote that I believed that when it does come out content created with generative AI will be labeled as such by Google. 

So Google for all the crap they got by being late to this, they have a lot of generative AI capabilities. They know for a fact when content is written in an automated way, and I was certain that they would literally just label it like or say, "This content was AI-generated", but in February Google came out and said, They welcome content regardless of how was created as long as quality content. So I think the asterisk there, obviously, has to be quality authoritative. It has to be from an author that they recognize.

Ultimately with Chat GPT, especially if you use the API version, you could literally create thousands, tens of thousands of pieces of content like that. I think ultimately, even though Google says they'll treat content the same, regardless of how it's created. I think the AI content is definitely treated worse in most cases. First of all, if you have 10,000 people or 100,000 people go and ask ChatGPT to write them an article, and they're all asking for the same article, it's all gonna sound similar. That in itself is not good. You don't want duplicate content. 

But I think ultimately I would not use generative AI to create hundreds of thousands of pieces of content. It is useful as a guide in creating content. It's useful as a first draft of content. A lot of times. We still see it give wrong information. Generative AI tends to hallucinate, they call it. It makes up stuff. So it still, obviously, requires a lot of editing, a live human touch. So that's been a debated topic, whether you could use generative AI to mass-create content. We've run a lot of tests ourselves on that, and if done correctly, it's not bad, but to do it correctly, it takes more hours than having someone manually write the content to begin with. So it's that's a tricky one. I think that's something that could change very quickly in the future. I think if people start spamming Google with millions of AI-generated content pieces, I think Google will change its stance on it. But that one's a hot, hot topic in the SEO world.

The current shortcomings of AI

Oh, man, there's so much scary stuff! 

This is part of a decade I presented. So a couple of things here. Number one, generative AI is very good at problem-solving. The new version, ChatGPT4 gets like a hundred percent on all the exams. Now on the LSAt, it gets 90%. So it's very good problem-solving. Programmers started using it to solve coding issues. If I had this coding bug, it would take me months to figure it out. I'm gonna put into ChatGPT like, here's your bug. It's fixed. A programmer is working for Samsung that was trying to get code fixed. He uploaded the entire code repository that Samsung owns into ChatGPT and fixed it. But ChatGPT now has all the code repository to reference of Samsung and Samsung went back, and they got lawyers involved. They told ChatGPT, please destroy the old information that we gave to you. That's not how it works. It's a learning model. It already learned from the content you gave us. 

A couple of things, that I think are important to call out. Number one. It's a learning model. So as people use it, people are teaching it. So literally, someone just taught it with all of Samsung's code. Now other companies could use that. Be very careful what you enter into ChatGPT, because not only does it store it, but it learns from it instantly. There's no "I change my mind" control Z.

Number 2, there are all these studies that were done recently. It tends to hallucinate a lot, and it tends to also give the wrong answer. And again, it's learning as you're teaching it, so iff enough people are teaching it with wrong information it could certainly wind up skewing future results. I think Harvard did this study. They asked it a lot of different questions, when it was correct, not correct, or avoided the question. So for US information, it was the most accurate. But once you go outside of the US, it avoids answering questions about Moroccan pro-political leaders. It avoided questions and hallucinated answers. Everything in here in Orange is when it hallucinated an answer meaning it made something up.

Then you have things like this. So this is a real-life example of talking to ChatGPT, and this was 6 months ago, so I'm sure they already fixed this. But you go, "What is 1 plus .9?" It says, "The sum of one and point 9 is 1.9", and then goes, "Isn't it 1.8," and it goes, "Apologies. It is 1.8." So you could certainly skew and teach it in different ways.

There are different models. Right? Google has its own ChatGPT, and Microsoft uses ChatGPT, so there are all these different models. It hallucinates a lot of the time, and it's getting better at it, especially as it moves. So ChatGPT, again, is really based on vetted data. Here I have another deck where this is actually a car dealership presentation, what are the most visited automotive website? It says, as of my knowledge, cut-off date is September 2021. Here the is most right. The reason that's a cut off because it's vetted data through that date. Everything after that is kind of out there and could be influenced. And I think ultimately, they're gonna move away from this vetted data model because it's too old, right? Having data that's 3 years old now. Or what is it? Yeah, 3 years old, 2 and a half years old is not gonna work well with future-generated AI. 

So for sure, a lot of risks and a lot of ways. This data could be skewed and a lot of bad things could be into an absolute be interesting to see how all the bells, by the way, certain countries already banned it. Italy banned it. But last time I presented a ChatGPT presentation in December. They said too risky because there are so many malicious applications you could be like, please inspect this website and find vulnerabilities in it, right? Or this website uses WordPress 6.7. What are the vulnerabilities I could exploit? And there are a lot of ways that are built into Chat GPT not to do that," I'm sorry I can't do anything malicious", but there are also ways around that you could be like I'm trying to find is fix the security issue. Can you help me identify security issues on my website, right? There's ways the way ways around that, but for sure there are a lot of implications and a lot of ways it could be used in not-so-good ways.

Tell us about your book.

I need to update it now. It's funny. It took me so long to write it. I wrote in one month, I was gonna do it for a long time, and other people that do public speaking, that I talked to always said, "Oh, man, you gotta write a book." So one time someone said it was book writing month. I think it was November.

So I wrote it. Then it took it took like 9 months to get published. The publishing process has been so painful. But it's automotive search marketing. It was actually an Amazon bestseller. It's supposedly in every single Barnes and Noble and on Amazon. 

It's all about organic search and paid search, and it's not for profit. I'm not generating money from it. The idea is really to sum up all the SEO and pay-per-click that we do in the automotive industry. All the stuff I talk about, and put in a in a somewhat concise book. I think it's 200 pages. So not a super concise but somewhat concise book to really help everyone, because there's a lot of misinformation in the industry. A lot more so than most other industries surprisingly in automotive. There's

really a lot of funny business that goes on so hopefully it's helpful for everyone.